Don’t blame the messenger

Here is a firm but qualified assertion. Scientists are often too hasty to criticize the media for inaccuracy and sensationalism in handling scientific issues. The assertion is qualified because some articles and programmes deserve condemnation. But it is firmly made because angry reactions are often disproportionate to alleged offences by the media, and in many cases are entirely misplaced. Consider, for example, a programme in BBC Television’s investigative Panorama series, entitled ‘Superbugs’, which was screened last year. It focussed on the burgeoning problems posed by bacteria insensitive to existing antibiotics, especially methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Afterwards, a medical microbiologist and a nurse at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital complained [1] that the programme had been needlessly upsetting. They had received dozens of ’phone calls, one of them about a nursing home that was refusing to accept patients from hospital if they were “colonized with MRSA”. “Three years of work by one of us in educating nurses and other health care workers about a rational policy regarding MRSA has been at least partially undermined,” said the complainants. “Stories about ‘doomsday killer bugs’ may make good copy but they cause much needless fear, suspicion and panic.” One sees the point. Yet even the writers, while criticizing the programme’s “doom laden image”, stated that it was “mostly factually correct.” Moreover, both the facts and the dire predictions came not from excitable journalists but from distinguished bacteriologists. “Experts talked of the war against resistant bacteria being lost, of the end of the antibiotic era, and of some hospitals concealing the presence of resistant bacteria in their wards.” What Panorama did was to dramatize, but not exaggerate, a problem whose very serious dimensions have been highlighted by several recent scientific conferences. During one of these, held by the Society for General Microbiology in Bath during 1995, Hans Zaehner of the University of Tübingen warned that “we are further away from mastering infectious diseases than we were 25 years ago.”